


i like to think i'm a good person

by relationshipcrimes



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Cannibalism, Enemies To Lovers To Enemies Speedrun, Gore, Graphic depictions of violence - Freeform, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, mentions of past rape, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:29:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29230020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/pseuds/relationshipcrimes
Summary: Akira rescues a young merman named Akechi from Shido’s laboratory, despite warnings that the creature is nothing but a mindless, vicious predator destined to be used as a specimen for illegal experiments. After a few days of keeping Akechi in his bathtub, Akira begins to suspect there’s more humanity in the merman than he was told.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira
Comments: 21
Kudos: 174





	i like to think i'm a good person

**Author's Note:**

> boy, i hope you read the tags on this one.

Once the idea to steal the specimen out of Shido’s lab is in Akira’s head, it’s hard to dissuade himself when he knows that he has nothing to lose—or rather, no _one_ to lose, because he has only his own life to risk and nobody who will miss him. With Akira’s years of experience and the fact that nobody expects the janitor they hired two months ago to have a decent brain, slipping the fishman out at two in the morning is almost too easy.

The tank even comes with wheels and nice custom-made cover to keep the contents out of sight, if you’d believe it, and Akira lives on the first floor of his apartment building to easily wheel the giant cylinder of water through the doorway, so it’s like a match made in heaven. He shoves his own apartment door open, immediately nearly runs over Morgana’s kitty-cat tail, apologizes to Morgana, and just then freezes at an angry thump from inside the tank.

Akira doesn’t respond. In his opinion, any engagement with it is a trap. He’s seen other experimenters interact with it. It never ends well.

He installs it in the lightless corner of his own bathroom, where there’s only one window, high up to let the shower steam out, and no chance of anyone outside seeing the ugly glass contraption. “Hello?” says a voice from inside—in perfect Japanese, perfectly pronounced, sounding quite young. Cautious, but not afraid.

Akira hisses between his teeth. Debates.

It’d be cruel to leave the guy with the tank covering on. He wouldn’t even get any light. What if he dies like that? It’d defeat the whole point of getting the thing out.

The second he pulls the tarp off, the specimen— _Goro Akechi_ , according to the lab notes, which seems like a weirdly human name to give to a lab experiment—anyway, Akechi seems eerily unsurprised by the fact that his entire surroundings have changed overnight. Akira supposes maybe that was normal, when Shido’s lab was running experiments on him; maybe Akechi never woke up expecting to be in the same place. Instead, Akechi just tilts his head this way and that, surveying the new terrain. He really has such a long and graceful neck. His skin is eerily flawless, like a doll’s. When he smiles at Akira, there’s something blank about his expression, a model’s image you’re supposed to imagine is really meant for you.

“You stole me from the lab,” Akechi says. Not a question, just a statement to confirm a hypothesis.

“While you were sleeping, yeah. I kind of didn’t know that fish could sleep, but the more you know.”

Akechi blinks—or maybe more accurately bats his eyelashes. Just like the lab notes said he would. “And what are you going to do with me?” he says slowly, like a line directly out of a porno.

“I’ve got a friend coming,” says Akira. “He’s going to ship you to the Antarctic.”

Akechi’s face drops. “What?”

Akira can’t help but smirk. “He’ll feed you on the way. It’s not a long trip. And once you’re there, you’ll have a long, happy life of hunting penguins or whatever the fuck, and you’ll never bother anyone ever again.”

Some sort of internal war between looking alluring and almost palpable rage makes Akechi’s face twitch. “But that’s—that’s ages away from anywhere. The Antarctic? I don’t _live_ in coldwater climates. I’ll barely have any food, it’ll take me another year to make the trek back to any other continent—"

Actually, Akechi isn’t going to make it back to any continent in any year, because Iwai has a nifty little anchor that can hopefully tether Akechi to the ocean floor somewhere. (Hopefully. Depends on how long the metal lasts.) “You’ll live,” says Akira, and makes to turn off the bathroom light.

“Wait!” Akechi blurts out. He has such an image of plaintive sincerity on his face that for a whole second, Akira is utterly convinced that it’s real. Maybe it is—maybe any animal is desperate enough for its survival that it makes everyone honest. Then Akechi gives him the doe eyes look again, just a little too perfect to be anything but fake. “Please don’t do this to me. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me or what Shido’s lab told you, but I won’t hurt anyone. If you just drop me off at the shoreline, I promise you’ll never hear from me again—"

“Listen,” says Akira, and sighs deeply. “I know how you operate.”

“—anything that you want from me. Even if you want to take advantage of me—"

“I know your game,” Akira interrupts loudly, “of luring people in with your pretty face and nice words.” Finally Akechi falls silent. “It doesn’t matter if the tank is locked from the outside if you can lure people in, right?”

Akechi’s face crumples. “Do you really think so little of me…? Do you really think that I’m just a mindless creature who lures people to their deaths so—"

“Yeah,” says Akira. “I do, actually. Because I’m the guy who cleaned Sugimura out of your tank when you were done eating him.”

Akechi’s plaintive, sorrowful face goes frozen, like a video clip on pause.

“Society is probably better off without you in it,” says Akira. “I just didn’t like what Shido was doing to you in that lab.”

“So you’d break me out of Shido’s lab and just put me in a different type of prison—!” Akechi sneers. The lip of his mouth stretches inhumanly far. “I suppose all of this was just to ease your own guilty conscience—!”

“You’re a lot cuter without the giggly cute siren gig,” Akira remarks, and smiles at the way Akechi’s fists clench. Akechi’s eyes are starting to bulge with the sheer force of not bursting into an angry tirade. “Oh, sorry,” Akira says smugly. “Do you dislike being flirted with if it’s not to lure prey in for feeding? Iwai’ll be here in a week, so you won’t have to put up with me for long. Oh, and—” Akira pauses, one hand on the bathroom light switch. “I already have a partner. So your seductive siren gig isn’t going to work on me.”

Akira’s actually incredibly single and has been for years, but if Akechi can lie to lure his prey in, then Akira can lie to protect himself. Akechi’s face snaps back to its pretty, bedroom-eyes head-tilt. “No lover is perfect,” he purrs. “Everyone wants something. I’m sure we can find other ways to have fun toge—”

“—also,” Akira adds, “if my friend comes by on the shipment date and finds me either dead or missing, I’ve told him to shoot you on sight. So think very carefully before you try luring me into the water.” And with that, Akira switches the lights off and shuts the bathroom door.

*

“Yeah, the animal abuse stuff was real,” Akira says into his phone.

The gun arcade game Akira is playing screams a new high score as he polishes off the last of the monsters with one hand on his phone, one hand on the gun console. “ _Christ_ ,” Makoto’s voice sighs on the other end of the line. “ _Rats? Pigs? Monkeys? Snakes? What is it?_ ”

Akira thinks about Akechi’s long, thick tail, like a snake’s body. “‘What is it’ is about right,” he says dryly. “Look, I already called a guy to take the animal back to hi—to its habitat.”

“ _You can’t just hand animals off to strangers, Akira. Someone’s going to sell it on the black market somewhere_.”

“I trust Iwai.”

Makoto sighs. “ _I know, Akira. You trust everyone_.”

“Thanks.”

“ _It’s not a compliment. You trust too much_.” 

Akira smiles without humor. “ _Okay_ ,” says Makoto after a second. “ _You’re a paranoid, secretive bastard, who for some reason has collected a network of people you’d trust purely on the principle of ‘thief’s honor.’ One of these days your thief’s honor is going to run out and you’ll put your trust in the wrong person and get bitten, is all I’m saying_.”

“Not going to happen. My vetting process for someone to enter my network is at least five years long.”

Makoto isn’t listening, as per usual. “ _Akira, how are we supposed to build a court case against Shido’s laboratory if you removed the animal? Why on earth would you remove the evidence from the scene?_ ”

“There’s plenty of other animal subjects left. Even if all the animals were cleared out tomorrow, there’d still be loads of stuff,” says Akira, chewing on his toothpick. “Seriously, Makoto, you could throw a dart and the police will pick up some dirt. You could have Shido in jail for three lifetimes with a quarter of the things I’ve seen there. The animal needed out for… humanitarian reasons.”

Makoto makes a little worried moue. “ _If you’re sure_ ,” she says, since apparently it only took three years for Makoto ‘professional cop’ Niijima to trust a filthy, rotten criminal like Akira Kurusu. “ _I’ll have the raid planned for four weeks from now. You have an escape route? Do you have another job lined up after this?_ ”

Cute of her to worry if he’ll have a paycheck after the police drop him like garbage now that he’s done his part of being their disposable mole to feed them intel. “Sure. Actually, I need an alibi for another gig that’s coming up,” says Akira. “Do you wanna be my fake girlfriend?”

Makoto chokes over the line for a bit while Akira feeds the arcade game another coin. “ _I don’t think that’s professional_ ,” Makoto sputters at last.

“Professional what? I’m literally a criminal you hire under the table for illegal intel.”

“ _I’m on the job with a very strict code of conduct_ ,” Makoto say.

“I resent the implication that I don’t have a code of conduct. Thief’s honor and all that.”

“ _I’m sure someone else out there will agree to be your fake girlfriend_ ,” says Makoto firmly. “ _And can you not call me from the arcade, next time?_ ”

Makoto would be such a convincing fake girlfriend. “Nobody can overhear me in this place. And nobody expects you to take a business call in the middle of an arcade surrounded by snotty ten-year-old boys.”

Makoto makes an upset noise. “ _Well, still_ …”

“Relax. I’m the pro. Get in, get the intel, get the intel to you somewhere no one will suspect, and then get out.”

“ _You haven’t gotten out yet_ ,” says Makoto. “ _Are you sure you know what you’re doing?_ ”

*

Akira walks in to Shido’s lab and puts a letter of resignation on the front desk. Caroline stops typing and looks at him in disbelief.

“Oh, _great_ ,” she says. “We just lost our most important specimen, sponsors are pulling out, and Shido’s grants are drying up, and now we’ve just lost our fucking _janitor_ , too.”

Akira scratches the back of his neck. Not exactly his finest play, but his job was just his cover to infiltrate Shido’s lab, he doesn’t actually need the cash when the police pay him for the dirty intel he handed over, and he really doesn’t want to be here when Makoto lights this place up. It’ll be way more suspicious if he just doesn’t show up for work. Best to maintain the cover that he was here for a legitimate job cleaning a fish tank—or rather “fish” tank—and try not to expect the police to cover his ass if the lab tries to go after him for leaking company secrets.

“Good morning, Caroline,” says Akira. “Do you talk to clients on the phone that way, too?”

Caroline glowers at the front desk phone. “The phone is _firmly off_ because we are _not open for business_ because we lost the fucking _fish_ , Kurusu. It should be damn illegal for you to make me go through another hiring process now of all times.”

“Sorry, Caroline. I really only took the job because I thought the fishman sounded cool. A while ago my cousin offered me a job closer to home that I turned him down, but since the fishguy isn’t here…” Akira shrugs.

Caroline groans in resignation, because Caroline doesn’t know shit about Akira’s family and isn’t the sort of person to look into it, so therefore Caroline wouldn’t know that Akira hasn’t spoken to his family in eight years. “Are you and all the other employees in some sort of union? Or did you all individually agree to leave the second the fishman disappeared?”

Akira tries not to smirk. He knows it’s not working.

Caroline is visibly not listening, typing something into her computer with keystrokes with about three times the amount of necessary force. “Fine. Fine! We’ll find another cleaner. Do you know how hard it is to find someone who knows how to use Chlorox correctly? Or how to wash glass without stains? You still have to come in for another two weeks. Got it?”

“Yes, of course,” says Akira, like a good and upstanding employee, an entirely unusual and nondescript janitor. “I’ll be here, Caroline,” he says, and he means it, too, because in this game, escaping surveillance isn’t an option. They know where he lives, and he has no doubt they’ll silence him in whatever ways they see fit if he acts oddly. At this point, his best bet is to keep his head down, wear his normal-person mask, wait out the two weeks, and then uphold whatever NDA they slap on him. Makoto will take care of the rest when she busts the place.

Abruptly, Caroline puts her face in her hands. “God,” she groans. “I _cannot_ believe we lost the specimen. How the shit do you lose a fishman? What freak thought it was a good idea to let him loose? That monster is going to eat someone on the street. Have you seen its teeth, Kurusu? Next newspaper headline is going to be some man-fish freak ripping someone apart on the subway because some idiot thought it looked cute and got too close.” She rubs at the hollows of her eyes. “We should be putting out a public safety warning for that thing, like… _Warning! If You See This Ikemen, Do Not Approach! He Will Eat Your Flesh From Your Face!_ ”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Akira laughs.

“It’s not funny, Kurusu!”

*

It is outrageously funny all the way home, until Akira opens his apartment and sees the bathroom door ajar, and Morgana’s little cat tail disappearing into the dark.

Then he sprints like his own life depends on it, throwing the door open with such force that it’s sure to break the drywall and skidding across the tiles to scoop his pet into his arms. “Nope! No, no no no,” Akira declares, picking Morgana up by his hairy armpits and tucking him under his arms like a football. 

Akechi holds his hands out from inside his tube and gives a disarming smile. Professionally printed, perfectly curved, with just the right amount of crinkling at the corners of the eyes—Akira sometimes gets the feeling that if Akechi didn’t have a tail, he would have been right at home on the cover of a magazine. “Really, Kurusu? It’s not like I have a way to get out of this tank. I’m really quite helpless when it comes to dry land, you know.”

Even Akechi’s voice is sweet. Akechi’s tail twists lazily, fluttering to hold him up and in place. All long curves, only lean muscle on the human half, not even a set of fangs in his mouth. The only visible weapon he has is his long nails. (Which is weird, because the lab notes said that he had sharp teeth.)

Either way, Akira’s not stupid. “Obviously that didn’t stop you from dining on Sugimura’s liver.”

Akechi’s smile disappears.

If anything, there’s something far more satisfying about seeing Akechi’s eyes narrowed and sharp. He knows what Akechi can do. He knows what Akechi is. He’s glad that Akechi does him the favor of not pretending otherwise. “You really didn’t like Sugimura, did you?” Akira asks off-handedly, as he bodily throws Morgana out the bathroom door with an offended catty yowl.

“If you were trapped in a glass tube, watching one of your torturers attempt to take advantage of a young girl in front of your eyes all day long,” Akechi says eventually, “what would you have done?”

“What, you had noble reasons for trapping and preying on Sugimura’s liver?” Do fishpeople even have a concept of coercive sexual harassment?

At this, there’s such a long silence that Akira stops what he’s doing and wonders if, perhaps, this is the part where he realizes he’s fucked up and Akechi is right behind him about to rip his jugular out, but when he turns, Akechi is safely on the other side of the plastic. His face is tense; Akira can practically hear him thinking. _Imitates human behaviors to an uncanny degree_ , Akira remembers from the lab notes. _Mimic skill on par with any natural predator that imitates another animal to lure in prey._

In a single instant, it’s as if Akechi’s entire tune changes. His expression drops to a look of cool, haughty unamusement. He holds himself straighter. At the corner of his mouth lurks a small sneer, and it looks as effortless and natural as the sweetness looked fake.

“I see there’s no sense in trying to convince you that I’m not a monster,” says Akechi at last. “So I’ll be truthful with you. This world is a horrible, awful place, full of unrepentantly ugly people who seek only to kill for their own pleasure and crush others for their own amusement. Of course I didn’t kill Sugimura for noble reasons. It’s as Shido and his team of scientists have always concluded: I’m simply a terrible, man-eating monster, who thinks of nothing beyond what he can eat and who he can kill.”

Akira studies him. Akechi, for once, doesn’t give him that sickly-sweet smile. In fact, there’s no trace of his little play-acting at flirtation. Instead, Akechi only turns his back on him and ignores Akira completely.

*

Morgana scratches at the pet food kitchen cupboard and mewls. “Yeah, I got it,” says Akira, and takes out Morgana’s bowl, Morgana’s wet food, and three large fish for Akechi. _Do monsters know they’re monsters?_ he thinks, and then looks up from where he’s mashing Morgana’s wet food and dry food together. “Do you know that you’re a cat?” he asks. Morgana blinks and meows again. _Do humans even know what they are?_ Akira wonders, and then: _Are humans ever truly self-aware?_

*

Akira has sometimes been prone to times of introspection, but entirely outside of conventional philosophy or principles, and entirely on his own. He’s never had a conversation about anything that’s happened inside his head. After the probation order went down and his parents washed their hands of him, he’s never had someone to share his thoughts with.

He’s not about to start now. He’s also not about to start with a pretty young man who’s only even half man. If he’s got questions about the inside of Akechi’s head, he’s not about to go asking them. As the days go by and the week drags on and Iwai’s pick-up date comes closer one miserable inch at a time, when Akira goes to sleep at night, he reminds himself that no matter how normal Akechi’s presence in his bathroom becomes, normalcy makes Akechi no less dangerous.

He reminds himself how dark the red water was after Akechi was done with Sugimura. How they hadn’t even been able to pull his body out, for fear that Akechi would drown whoever opened the tank lid. How the stench of rotting carcass bloomed through the vents for days, and when the water filters and drainage system flushed all the water out, bits of Sugimura’s scalp and eyes and teeth had come through the water grate. Every morning, Akira wakes up and unlocks Morgana from his kitty cage (for fear of Morgana wandering into the bathroom again), and goes to brush his teeth while refusing to make eye contact with Akechi in the bathroom mirror.

One morning (passably morning; 11:45 AM counts as morning), Akira opens the bathroom door to find Akechi curled up at the bottom of his cylindrical tank. The surface area at the bottom is no bigger than a small coffee table, causing Akechi to coil over his own tail in a circle like a snake. He is facedown.

“Akechi?!” Akira blurts out, inching towards the tank much closer than he knows he should go. Akechi doesn’t stir. “Akechi!”

Akechi breathes shallowly in the water. Slowly, he pushes himself up on his forearms. Lean muscle moves under his bare back; if he didn’t look so miserable and sick, Akira would have suspected him of putting on a show. “Akechi, are you okay?”

“What do you care,” says Akechi angrily to the tiles on the far wall of Akira’s bathroom. “What does it matter if I die here or in Shido’s lab.”

“Don’t be dramatic. You’re going back to the ocean.”

“A new jail cell. Does it make a difference if a monster dies in one cell or another,” Akechi says.

On reflex, Akira almost says, _You’re not a monster_ , because he hates it when people talk about themselves that way—expecting nothing, wanting nothing, thinking themselves as low and ugly as everyone else thinks they are. If Akira believed everything that other people thought of him— _attic trash, delinquent, criminal, thief, letch, unstable individual_ —then Akira would—

—Well, Akira did turn out to be attic trash, a delinquent who dropped out of high school, a professional criminal, and a damn good thief, too. Jury’s still out on the other two, he supposes, but he knows more than anyone that people speak things into existence when they call a person a name.

“Don’t call yourself that,” says Akira instead.

Akechi’s lip curls with disgust. “Why not if it’s true?”

Oh, Akira really, really does not like imagining what it must have been like for Akechi to live day in and day out in Shido’s lab, listening to people with clipboards and lab coats calling him a specimen, an experiment, a predator, a vicious and mindless animal. Akira didn’t like it so much that he got Akechi out, and yet here they are: The damage has already been done.

“What’s the point of rescuing me if you’re just going to keep me like a prisoner,” says Akechi coldly. “The only thing that’s changed is that I have different things to look at. Like your twenty bottles of hair gel.”

There’s a moment of silence, in which Akira tries to figure out how to explain that he’d rescued Akechi in the first place to stop them from experimenting on him, which should make him the good guy, and couldn’t Akechi be a little less right about this?

Akira takes a deep breath.

Then he grabs the tubes at the bottom of the plastic tank and unlatches his shower head.

“What are you doing,” Akechi says.

“If you wanna just lay around in misery and let Shido get under your skin, go ahead,” says Akira. “But I’m not letting you die. You could have just told me that your water hasn’t been changed recently.”

“Life in prison is the same as life in another prison.”

Akira pauses. Thinks about juvie, about probation, about eventually real time during his adult life. Then he turns the shower head on.

“Careful. Don’t get too close,” Akechi says softly. “Or I’ll lure you in with my charms and tear your throat out.” Akechi, for the first time in days, smiles that ugly, fake smile of his.

“Then don’t do that,” Akira replies. “Geez. You won’t get fed if you kill me, you know that, right?”

“A mindless animal doesn’t choose whether or not to give up a meal. Savage monsters are base instinct and nothing more.”

“You’re not really convincing me to help you, you know that?”

“I didn’t ask for your help,” says Akechi. “I hardly think it’s any of your business to help such an irredeemable, awful creature as myself. No?”

Akira grits his teeth. He shoves the tube at the bottom of the tank into his bathtub to drain the water out, then gets on a stepstool to shove the shower head into a little grate at the top. Through the wire mesh, Akechi looks up at him without hope. “I said don’t—talk about yourself that way.”

“It’s only the truth. Do you want to know how a monster works?” And before Akira can say no, obviously not, Akechi goes on: “We’re born with an innate sense to offer what other people want. There’s a lure for every fish, and there’s a lure for every human. It’s only a matter of figuring out what humans want from you, and then you become it. Sugimura wanted someone he could choke during sex without their consent, and I wanted a dinner. Is that something a human would do?”

With all the preparation in place to change the water, Akira turns the shower on and lets the tank water begin to trickle out of the tube. “Stop it. Just because Shido and his band of evil scientists said it, it does _not_ mean that’s true.”

“If everyone else calls me a monster, who am I to dispute it?” Akechi replies. “Even you say so.”

Akira opens his mouth. Hesitates. Thinks about Sugimura’s scalp in the drainage pipe.

Akechi lowers his head and curls back in on himself, as if seeking safety in his own limbs. The water gurgles loudly as it drains.

*

In Akira’s mind, vicious predators who feed on human beings shouldn’t look so fragile and lost. Or become depressed and bitter and angry when faced with prison time. Or take it too personally to heart when his captors call him a monster day in and day out. That’s the sort of thing a human does. The sort of thing Akira did.

“Kurusu,” says Shido’s voice, and Akira jolts out of his thoughts. True to his janitorial job description, Akira’s been mopping the floors for the last twenty minutes—the sort of dead-end, minimum-wage job that people with criminal records are good for—and he hadn’t realized that the section of tile in front of him is now shiny enough to see his own reflection in. “I hear that you’re resigning.”

Akira wipes his hand on his shirt. There’s literally no reason for a man with two PhD’s and an entire multi-million dollar marine science lab to be talking to his janitor, let alone one that Caroline hired specifically because Akira’s criminal record means he’s disposable. He knows something—or at least suspects something. Akira is already weighing whether or not calling Makoto will help: If he’s a mole they hired because he’s disposable and he asks for help, what’s the changes that the police will wash their hands of him and leave him to get chewed up by Shido?

“Yes, sir,” says Akira at last, imitating the slight drawl that he hears from Iwai and other men who’ve done time in prison to play his part of the underpaid cleaner with the criminal record. He almost leans on his mop, then thinks better of it, worried that it might look too confident for a janitor who doesn’t have any real prospects in life. (Not that Akira the thief has any real prospects in life, but it at least doesn’t feel that way when he’s helping law enforcement dunk on corrupt pieces of shit like Shido.) “Surprised you know my name, sir. Am I in trouble?”

Shido chuckles. He has a way of chuckling that sounds too genial, so friendly and self-assured, that Akira instantly has the impulse to take a baseball bat to his knees. “Of course not. No, not at all. Do me a favor, Kurusu, and walk with me.”

What ensues is the most awkward and longest short walk of Akira’s life, down claustrophobic metal hallways between lab rooms that Akira could have sworn weren’t empty a second ago. Shido seems entirely unbothered by the lack of small talk, while Akira, who is also usually unbothered by lack of small talk, wonders if he’s about to get fed to a tank of piranhas, or whatever it is that evil scientists like Shido who keep fishmen locked up in tanks get up to. “Excited to be back with your family?” says Shido at last.

“What?” Akira says.

“Your job your cousin offered you.”

“—Oh!” Akira says when he remembers his cover story, and then mentally slaps himself across the face. “Yes. Of course.”

“You don’t sound too excited.”

“It’s a bit of a downgrade from an exciting job like this one,” says Akira.

“Why the change?”

“Being a janitor isn’t interesting without the fishguy.”

Shido chuckles. “Was it entertaining to you? Is watching a fishman an ex-criminal’s idea of a good time?”

Akira nearly stops walking right then and there. Shido, for whatever reason, seems to see nothing wrong with calling Akira a _fucking_ _criminal_ to his face. “Whenever something goes wrong, I always ask the people who go unnoticed,” Shido says, like he’s talking to himself. “Those of us who’re high up tend to have a very different viewpoint than those on the ground. Those of us who go unseen see more than anyone else. I’m curious, Kurusu, if there was anything that you saw the night the specimen disappeared.”

“No, sir.” Akira can’t keep the bite of frost out of his tone.

“Nothing at all?”

“No.”

“How unusual.”

“I keep my head down and mouth shut, sir,” says Akira.

Shido nods slowly, contemplatively. “When I worked on the specimen, I always thought of a certain fable. Have you ever heard the story about the frog and the scorpion?”

Akira’s silence stretches so long—more out of confusion than anything else—that Shido eventually prompts him: “Have you?”

“Yes, sir,” Akira makes himself say.

“And?”

Another silence from Akira. Were he not already resigning, he has the feeling that whatever he says next—whether he likes it or not—will be something so fucking stupid out of his sheer fury at Shido that he would get himself fired. Shido says again, “Come, now. You can speak freely.”

Shido has a way of smiling that makes Akira want to peel Shido’s skin off. Shido’s wide, genial politician smiles seem weirdly detached from the rest of him, like there’s a layer of disconnect between Shido’s skin and the rest of him. Sometimes, Akira wonders if he just imagined that some people put their heart on their sleeve and say what they mean and smile when they’re happy and frown when they’re sad; maybe everyone in the whole world is wearing a skin-suit like Shido is, and Akira is the only person who didn’t get the message.

“If I may be honest, sir?” Akira says.

“Of course,” says Shido.

_I think you’re full of shit_ , Akira thinks, as loudly and clearly as he can. “I don’t see the connection between the fable and the fishguy, sir.”

“Surely you must. The scorpion cannot betray its own nature. Innately malicious, innately predatory, it is unable to stop itself from hurting those around it, even if it means its own death.”

“I always thought that ‘the frog and the scorpion was a lesson in choice,” Akira says instead. “Refusal to believe in one’s own ability to choose means you’ll eventually believe you have to choose your own destruction.”

Shido chuckles as if this is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Akira can almost see the skin-suit peeling from his facial muscles like bubbling wallpaper. “My, that is a new one. So the protagonist of the story is the scorpion, then? It was the scorpion who had a lesson to learn, not the frog.”

“I suppose so,” says Akira, who is remembering how bad he was in Japanese literature class during high school.

“Not sure that’s the right moral of the story.”

“Of course, sir.”

“The scorpion warns that its nature is undeniable. It stings and it kills. That is the point of it. There is no redeeming it, no saving it, no reasoning with it—not even with the scorpion’s life itself is on the line.

“Of course, sir,” says Akira again.

Shido studies him. “And you know nothing about where the specimen may have gone?”

“No, sir,” says Akira.

Shido grunts. In a single instant, the entire genial veneer drops with such speed that Akira can’t help but think about the sudden about-turn Akechi had done when he’d dropped his own act. “A fucking waste,” Shido mutters under his breath, and walks off before Akira can make him explain exactly who he was calling a _fucking waste_.

*

Akira throws his work bag violently into his bedroom. “And _another_ thing!” Akira tells Morgana loudly. “Some chucklefuck out there decided that some people are _inherently evil_ and _can never be changed_ —like it isn’t literally just some story that some guy somewhere came up with!”

Morgana meows.

“Right! It’s _fiction_! Of course this fictional series of events proves the point of the author because that’s what _he believes_. It’s all made up! It’s a talking frog and a talking scorpion! It’s—it’s two sockpuppets that the author is using to make a ham-fisted point—”

Morgana meows again as Akira marches angrily into the bathroom. His mouth tastes like a dead animal because of the beer he picked up after work, and he’s too pissed off to drink anymore, so Akechi watches him curiously through the plastic tank as Akira brushes his teeth like he means to scrub the enamel straight off with sheer force alone.

“Is this Shido?” Akechi asks suddenly.

Akira rips the toothbrush out of his mouth and slams it on the sink. “ _Yes_ it’s fucking _Shido_. The absolute sanctimonious piece of shit pulled me aside to ask if I knew anything about where you went—obviously I didn’t say anything—and then the pretentious motherfucker suddenly went into a whole lecture about _some people are inherently evil_ and then decided to use a three century old _fable_ to prove his point—” Akira spits out toothpaste, washes it out, spits again. “It’s just a story! It’s just _his_ opinion. I’m supposed to believe some dipshit’s fantasy about a frog who can talk and a philosophical scorpion like it’s a law of the universe—?”

“Stories often reflect truths.”

“Stories _make_ truths,” Akira says angrily. “You start using little sockpuppets to talk about _inherent badness_ or whatever and then some idiot starts believing it. And then they go around behaving that way.”

Akechi snorts. “Shido truly uses the most subtle of metaphors to prove his point.”

Akira spits again into the sink so hard that he almost bangs into the mirror. “Subtle like a hammer to the face,” he says tells Akechi’s reflection viciously. “What kind of person goes around randomly pulling aside people who can’t refuse him and lecturing them about how right and correct he is about everything—?”

“He’s like that,” Akechi says, smirking.

“—lecturing me about what I do with some obscure deep metaphor like he isn’t trying beat me over the head with his so-called moral of the story—”

Akechi giggles.

“—because he did that thing he does where he asks you a question like he actually wants to know your thoughts, and then the second you actually tell him your thoughts, he’s like, oh, sorry, not like that, and also you’re wrong—"

Water ripples along the top of the tank as Akechi tries to hide his laughter. His eyes crinkle cutely at the corners, his voice clicking like a dolphin’s chirp. Akira looks away quickly when Akechi catches him staring.

Ears suddenly burning, Akira turns back to the sink and washes his mouth out. “I don’t know how you put up with him for all this time. If I was trapped in a tube and had to listen to his sanctimonious horseshit around the clock, I would’ve just killed myself.”

“I did try.”

Akira looks at him. Akechi, still smiling, leans his head in the crook of his elbow along the rim of the tub. “That’s why they had to give me pureed meat and fish. No bones to stab myself with.”

Akira stares. _I’ve been feeding him whole fish with bones in it_ , is his first thought. Then: _He hasn’t used it to kill himself._ Then: _Yet_.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Akechi replies. “It’s better to die on your own terms than to live under someone else’s control, don’t you think?”

Akira doesn’t know the answer to that. He _is_ glad, though, that Akechi doesn’t have to make that choice anymore. “Yeah,” says Akira, less in an agreement and more just to get the conversation over with, and slips the toothbrush back in its cup. “Gendo Ikari motherfucker,” he mutters.

“Who’s Gendo Ikari?”

Akira waves it away. “Well, if it helps, Shido’s about to get what’s coming to him when the police get their shit together. The entire place is illegal as hell, so the second they’re in, they’ll confiscate everything and put his ass in jail for the rest of his life.”

“…That does help,” says Akechi, in an oddly stilted tone of voice. Like he knows what he’s supposed to say, but not how to make it feel real. “Would the police have confiscated me as well?”

“You’d count as an experiment.”

There’s a barely suppressed sneer on Akechi’s face that disappears as quickly as it came, replaced by whatever prideful, haughty mask Akechi wears now that he isn’t trying to flirt Akira’s pants off. “Then I guess I owe you on two counts.”

“Just don’t eat me and we’ll call it even.” Morgana pokes his head through the bathroom door, and Akira quickly shoos him back out with a foot.

“You’re quite a good person to waive such a debt.”

“I like to think I am one,” says Akira.

“You do,” says Akechi. “Don’t you.”

But when Akira looks back at him, Akechi is staring at the little shaft of light coming from the high bathroom ceiling, barely larger than the window you’d find in a basement or a jail cell. There could not be a clearer signal that the conversation is over. Akira supposes it’s a talent he’d have to pick up in a place where people could force you to hold a conversation with them whenever they wanted, so he takes the hint, leaves the lights on, and shuts the door.

*

In juvie, Akira wasn’t allowed to have metal utensils. He couldn’t own snacks, even though everyone had a bag of popcorn smuggled under their mattress somewhere, which was very useless because they didn’t have a microwave. He could drink only out of flimsy plastic cups that could bend under two fingers’ worth of pressure, so he couldn’t break it and stab someone with the plastic shards. He could have deodorant, until someone else in the compound figured out how to shove a bit of the case into someone’s eye, and then they all had to go without. No pens. No pencils. No nail clippers, which was fun when Akira wound up breaking several of his nails just from growing them out on accident and bled all over his shirt which, for some reason, got him into trouble. And it wasn’t the lack of having things that bothered him—it was the lack of trust. How people looked at him like, at any second, he could be expected to tear someone apart with nothing but his nails and teeth, and the more they looked at him like that, the more it sounded like a good idea.

*

With only a week and a half left to Iwai’s shipment date, Akira locks Morgana in his cat carrier and gets to figuring out how to operate the metal platform the scientists used to use to wheel Akechi’s tank around. It has a little mechanical lever to lift and tilt the tank sideways, in the event that they ever wanted to dump out the entirety of the tank’s contents. Which is what Akira, coincidentally, wants to do.

“ _Why_?” Akechi asks, when he wakes up to the sound of Akira running a bath.

“I’m getting you a book,” Akira replies.

Before he dumps Akechi in the bathtub, he does a little mental calculation: If Akechi’s armspan is around a meter and his torso can add around another meter if he crawls halfway out of the tub, then Akira should go no closer to the tub than the far end of his sink. (Meaning he’ll have to brush his teeth in the kitchen and use the public baths for the foreseeable future.) This is, of course, on the assumption that Akechi can’t operate on dry land and needs to stay in the tub at all times, but he could have sworn he read something in one of the lab reports that said that.

He memorizes that metric: He can’t go any closer to Akechi than the first corner of the bathroom sink. No closer than the fifth tile from the door. He’ll ask Iwai to get a tranq gun when they have to put him back in the tank for transportation… or something.

When Akira finally gets the lever to tilt the tank sideways, Akechi slips into the bathtub and bangs into the faucet with an emphatic and offended “ _Ow_!” that makes Akira giggle despite himself. “Don’t laugh!” Akechi says haughtily.

“Sorry, sorry, it’s just—the elegant and beautiful fishman thing you have going on—"

“I’d like to see _you_ get dumped out of a fishtank gracefully!”

He’s actually _very_ cute when he’s offended. “ _And_ you got water all over your bathroom floor,” Akechi points out. He pushes himself up on the rim of the tub. It’s not big enough to fit all of him, so the end of his tail hangs along the edge, but there’s a solid moment where Akira can see Akechi realize that he has actual elbow room for once, doesn’t have to tread water constantly to stay afloat and upright. He stretches out in his new space to rest his arms on the sides of the bathtub, almost uncertainly, like he doesn’t know what to do with his minimal new freedom now that he has it.

Akira, for his part, stands as far away as he can without being entirely out of the bathroom.

“It’s an improvement, though, isn’t it?” Akira asks.

“I won’t complain,” says Akechi. “The better question is what on earth are _you_ letting me out of the containment tank for?”

Akira makes a face at _containment tank_. He wants to say _I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt_ , but that sounds insane even to him. _I’m hoping you’ll prove me right when I say that you’re wrong about yourself being a monster_ , which sounds not only insane but extremely wordy and tautological. Akechi looks at him expectantly.

Instead, Akira grabs his tablet from the kitchen and hands it over—at a very far arm’s length, staying on the far side of the sink so that Akechi has to strain just to grab the corner. “Here,” says Akira grudgingly, and hands over his tablet. “Don’t drop it in the water.”

“What is this?”

“It’s got books and stories and stuff in there. I think I’ve got, uh, maybe forty books in there? Fifty? There’s a little book-reading app. It’s, uh…” Explaining what a PDF file is to a fishman was not how Akira expected this to go. “You know what a book is? Wait, can you read?”

“Yes, I can _read_ ,” Akechi says acidly. But he does look genuinely perplexed by the tablet. “ _Why_ are you giving this to me?”

Akira scratches the back of his neck. The silence goes on, and Akechi just looks at him expectantly, unwilling to let him off the hook and fill the silence himself. “I figured that it must be awful to have to sit around all day with nothing to do,” says Akira at last.

Akechi stares at the tablet, perplexed. Akira wonders if it’s because he doesn’t know what a tablet is, or because he’s never been given a luxury item to make his imprisonment easier. “That’s very thoughtful of you. Even kind,” says Akechi at last. “How do you use it?”

“There’s buttons and things on the screen, and you—dry your hands first, though, water will make it malfunction. You swipe on the screen to select the book you want.”

Akechi looks at him sidelong. “Do you want to come over here and show me?”

Akira laughs. “Uh, nice try.”

For only a moment, a flash of hurt slides across Akechi’s face—and then it’s gone, as quick as it came.

“So that’s how it is,” says Akechi quietly.

“That was a joke,” Akira says quickly.

“Don’t lie to me.”

Okay, Akira wasn’t joking. He is still keenly aware of the possibility that this is all just a very elaborate con to get Akira to climb in the bathtub willingly. Still: “You’re not a monster,” Akira says emphatically. “I’m letting you out of the tank because I don’t think you are, and you don’t deserve to just hang around all day long with nothing to do. So at least you have a tablet to read or watch videos on. Okay?”

Akechi stares down at the tablet. His fingers have begun to tighten. Akira watches thin lines appear on the tablet casing and screen where his nails slide, effortlessly scratching the glass. “Do you get some sort of satisfaction out of mocking me, Kurusu?”

“I’m not! I don’t believe the stuff about you being a hideous creature. It’s just shit that Shido says and it doesn’t have to be true if you don’t want it to be and also fuck his scorpion story.”

Akechi’s knuckles are white. “You won’t even come near me. You can say any lie you want, but in your heart, you’re afraid.” The words drip from his mouth like poison: “You believe him just as much as I do.”

Before Akira can say anything to that, Akechi holds the tablet out to him. He refuses to even look at Akira. “Here. I don’t want your pity.”

Akira almost reaches out to grab it, then reminds himself about the bathroom sink marker. “Put it on the ground and slide it towards me. It’s not safe to—”

Akechi throws the tablet across the room. It shatters against the far wall. “ _Liar_!” Akechi roars. “After all your bullshit and empty promises—!”

Some hindbrain instinct makes Akira bolt out of the bathroom and slam the door shut. “ _Fuck_ you!” Akechi’s voice hollers after him, and then dead silence, and then the faint sound of ragged, hitched breathing. Then the splash of water, and silence.

*

After that, Akira tries not to go into the bathroom anymore.

He hopes that Akechi doesn’t think that it’s because he’s afraid of getting eaten.

(Even if he is.)

*

The days drag by slowly. Finally, Akira finishes his last day at Shido’s lab, and he leaves the place without telling a single one of his coworkers goodbye—exception of Caroline, who told him to go fuck himself for leaving them shorthanded, to which he blew her a kiss and did not look back. On that day, he goes grocery shopping for another billion pounds of fish to feed Akechi, which he washes and descales in the kitchen so absentmindedly that he almost slices his thumb open and, for some reason, doesn’t realize that Morgana hasn’t meowed at him to feed him dinner once.

He takes the raw bag of fish to the bathroom door just as Akechi’s voice comes through the wood: “Do you want pets? Want pets?” Akechi’s voice says softly. “Hm? Like that? Around the ears?”

Akira throws the bathroom door open. Akechi looks up, Morgana halfway crawled into his damp arms, purring loudly. Very much alive and unharmed.

“Can I help you, Kurusu?” asks Akechi flatly.

Akira hesitates. “I thought…” _I thought you were going to gut Morgana like a fish and eat his heart?_

Akechi narrows his eyes. “You thought what?”

Morgana rolls over in Akechi’s arms for better scratches, and instead of ripping Morgana’s head off, Akechi pets Morgana’s back, his pointed nails raking harmlessly through Morgana’s fur.

“Nothing,” says Akira.

Akechi makes an expression like he’s strongly wishing he could roll his eyes and only refuses to out of sheer pride, hatred, and spite. Instead, he tucks the cat’s tail against Morgana’s stomach, so it won’t brush the tub water. “Think about nothing more softly. You’re going to scare him away. It took me ages to lure him in close enough.”

_There’s a lure for everyone_ , Akechi had said, almost two weeks ago when Akira had first brought him here. _Do you want to know how a monster works? It’s only a matter of figuring out what humans want from you, and then you become it. Sugimura wanted someone he could choke during sex without their consent._

“It’s Morgana’s dinner time,” Akira says haltingly. The more Morgana stretches out lazily in Akechi’s arms, the more twisted Akira’s gut becomes, but he doesn’t know if it’s nerves or guilt. “Should I… leave his dinner here…?”

“If you would be so _kind_. It’s not like I’ve got any other company to share a meal with around here,” says Akechi tartly. His sharp nails dig into the fur under Morgana’s skull, but Morgana only purrs and closes his eyes in bliss.

Akira puts the fish and Morgana’s bowl on a plastic wrapper in the middle of the bathroom, edging past his self-made marker of the bathroom sink corner to creep just within Akechi’s reach, and he watches Akechi the entire time he’s within grabbing distance. Akechi doesn’t pay attention to him at all in favor of sliding the pad of his thumb across Morgana’s whiskers.

*

Akira knows that he lets Akechi keep Morgana out of guilt. Morgana, the fucking traitor, takes to Akechi so strongly that he begins to spend very little time anywhere else. Now Akira has to lure his own cat out of Akechi’s arms to feed him properly, and standing in Akechi’s new room (because Akira now thinks about his own bathroom as Akechi’s room) is always an awkward, agonizing process of Akira trying to figure out how to apologize, if he should apologize, if he has anything to apologize for, and whether or not he should just white-knuckle the next couple of minutes without cracking.

He stands carefully on the far side of the sink, so that Akechi can’t reach him, and he sees the ice crawl across Akechi’s face every time he does it. Usually, Akechi refuses to hand Morgana over for entire minutes, and Morgana, the dumb son of a bitch, of course does not leave Akechi’s arms if Akechi doesn’t make him go.

In the middle of the fourth time they do this, Akira blurts it out without thinking: “I just thought it’d be better to be in the tub than in the containment tank.”

“You’re just the same as Shido,” says Akechi evenly.

Akira can’t suppress his wince. He has to close his eyes for a second before he can keep going. “I’m trying to get you out of his lab so you aren’t trapped under his control—”

“And now I’m trapped here.”

“You’re going to be free in, what, five days?”

“To the Antarctic,” says Akechi without intonation. “I’ll starve.”

“There’s plenty of animals there.”

“Not the animals I eat,” says Akechi. “And it’s freezing. I’ll probably die of cold in a week, if not less. It looks to me like you helped me for no other reason but for your own selfish reasons.” Akechi taps his nails along the tub’s rim while Morgana twists around, trying to get comfortable in the crook of his arm. “Humans are like that, aren’t they. Self-serving. Seeing what they want to see. And they say it’s my fault when I figure out what it is they want to see from me, and they’re stupid enough to get in the water.”

“What do you want from me? Do you want me to agree that I’m a selfish piece of shit?” Akira says.

“If I’m right.”

At some point, Akira had resolved to apologize, but now he’s just needled and irritated and he’s probably needled and irritated because Akechi is right, but it’s not going to stop him now. “Fine. I like to think I’m doing some good in the world. Like maybe I’m not being a total waste of a human being. I guess that’s so terrible and so wrong. I guess I fuck up when I do it. I guess maybe I do it wrong. What do you want me to say?”

Akechi smirks. “I think it’s more about what you want from _me_.”

“I want to do the right thing!” Akira says angrily. “When I was in high school, I wound up with a record for doing literally _jack shit_. And now I’m here as a professional thief because the police want an ex-criminal to gather intel illegally and wash their hands of me if I get caught. Because nobody was there for me, right? Not my family, not my teachers, not my friends—”

The rest of that little speech was supposed to be _and that’s why I wanted to do right by you_ , but Akira’s throat clamps shut like a vice and fills fast with what he knows is tears. Akira covers his mouth and tries not to choke.

“…Kurusu,” says Akechi after a moment.

“I was a shithead,” Akira’s strangled voice goes on. He takes a breath and makes himself go on: “I was stubborn and a little bit of a rebellious delinquent and I gave everyone a hard time if they tried to help but, fuck, if someone had just refused to listen to my bullshit and helped me anyway—”

Because he’d just been at the wrong place at the wrong time, trying to do the right thing around the wrong people.

And at the beginning, he’d expected that maybe things would get better. He could do his time, be a good boy, leave it behind him in one way or another. He’s left juvie and expected freedom. Leaving prison was just stepping into a bigger, more expansive prison, in which every employer who refused to hire him or landlord who refused to rent to him was just a more powerful, more subtle warden. Teachers called him a thief. A freeloader. A disgrace. A shame to society. And for years, he’d kept to himself the secret knowledge that this wasn’t true, that he was better than this, he was a good and honest person; and over time, when he heard people on the news talk about thieves in the night, he began to think, _Like me_ ; and when he overheard people talking about the disgusting, the undesirable, the nuisances of the world, he began to think, _Like me_ ; and when people turned up their noses at the homeless lurking in the subway stations or the women stalking in the alleyways in short skirts, Akira began to think, _That’s me_. And over time, like a dog, he was called a thief enough that eventually he began to answer to the name.

He likes to think he has standards, all things considered for what other people have made him become. Nowadays, he specializes in “liberating items” from the possession of those who don’t deserve it: Pieces of art in the hands of museums who stole their works, blackmail and nude photos in the hands of people who should have deleted them, intel from companies who need a proper tanking. He doesn’t let the police get their hands on him. He hands over everything law enforcement needs in order to put people properly away in jail, and he doesn’t think too hard about what those people must be going through in the cells where he once sat. He never steals anything from anyone who needs the money. He even gives a lot of the stuff he steals away. And he might wear his criminal nature with flourish now, and he might have made the best of the worst, but he knows, deep down, that he never wanted to be a thief. He knows, deep down, that he only rejected society because it rejected him first.

Maybe Akechi clocked him right: Akira tries to be a good person. He wants to be. Even if it doesn’t matter to anyone else—even if nobody believes him—he likes to think that he is. If he doesn’t do the right thing, what else can a person like him offer?

Akechi stares at him from the tub, as if waiting for the tears to fall; Akira bites his lip hard and keeps his eyes wide open, afraid that even a blink would be too much.

“Whatever,” Akira spits out at last. He barely gets the words out of his tight throat. “I don’t need a thank you. Yeah, maybe—maybe I’ve been an asshole to you. At least you’re not receiving electrical shocks on the daily.” _Fuck_ , he’s supposed to be apologizing, and he’s on the brink of tears—if someone apologized to him while pulling this sort of stupid fucking pity card, he’d have punched them. “I did my best,” Akira mumbles, and takes his glasses off quickly and turns to leave, so he can brew the strongest coffee he’s capable of making and hope the caffeine will shock him out of having emotions.

“I don’t want to make it seem like I’m ungrateful that you got me out of Shido’s lab,” Akechi says before he can go. “I am thankful. I know that it’s hard for you to trust me. But for whatever it’s worth… I am glad that you’re trying.”

“Forget it,” Akira says tightly. “Just—forget I said anything—”

“I mean it,” says Akechi. “I was out of line when I said that you were like Shido. I’m sorry I said that.”

“I’m the one who should be apologizing to you. I’ve been a total asshole to you, I’ve stuck you in a jail like everyone else—”

“You fed me, you give me privacy, you give me things for entertainment. And you let me keep your cat,” Akechi adds, like an afterthought.

Akira puffs out a wet laugh. His eyelashes are soaked. “I think feeding you is the bare minimum.”

“It’s not,” Akechi says quietly. “When you’re under someone else’s control, living in someone else’s prison, they can do whatever they like to you.”

Akira remembers: Deep in the lab’s records was a series of notes about a past experiment. They used to have two specimens: A female and a male, or specifically a mother and a son. There’d been rumors that technicians—even Shido himself—would dry the female specimen out for hours, until she couldn’t breathe for lack of water, and asphyxiation left her weak and disoriented. The rumors were that if you gagged her mouth so she couldn’t bite, you could do whatever you liked with her. Eventually they did it too often, and she grew permanently feeble and infirm, sometimes incapable of even keeping herself afloat in the water, until eventually Shido determined this was an opportunity for yet another type of experiment. Orders were given to put the two specimen, both mother and son, in the same tank. Neither were fed for weeks. Then almost a month. Both of them grew thin and weak, half mad with starvation; the son was notoriously dangerous, and had to be kept collared and shocked at all times just for medical check-ups. When they checked the tank on the twenty-seventh day, there was little remaining of the female specimen except her bones, which had been sucked clean, and the rumor was that there was a recorded sound clip in which she’d begged her own son to devour her. _Freedom in death over confinement_ , one experimenter had written in the file’s margins.

In Akira’s bathtub, now, Akechi puts Morgana down gently on the bathroom floor. “Maybe you don’t really believe that I’m not a monster,” Akechi says softly, looking down at where he’s scratching Morgana’s ears. “But you’re the first person to even entertain the idea. And I’m in your debt for that.”

Akira knows he’s being offered something precious, maybe something that Akechi has never shown anyone before, but it’s too much. “Okay,” Akira chokes out, which is probably the lamest possible thing he could have said, and takes Morgana and stumbles back out of the bathroom, feeling like he’s been flayed alive from the inside. Akira is burning his own tongue on his second cup of coffee when he realizes that, like an idiot, he’d been standing on the wrong side of the bathroom sink the entire time.

Akechi could have drowned him at any moment.

Akira turns over the words like a smooth stone in his palms: _You’re the first person to even entertain the idea. I’m in your debt for that._

*

“Books aren’t really my thing,” says Akechi, the next day Akira comes in to give him breakfast. Akira is so, so grateful they’re not talking about yesterday. “Do you happen to have any games?”

“What, like a video game?”

“Board games. Card games. Chess. Checkers.”

As it turns out, Akira does have an old chess set—one of the roll-out mats that fit in a tube with plastic pieces that are safe to get wet with, say, bathwater. Akechi rests his elbows on the side of the bathtub while Akira places the chess set within easy arm’s reach, although he himself sits, not quite in the safe zone and just close enough for Akechi to touch, but far enough away that he could scramble to safety if he had to. This time, Akechi makes no comment on it.

“Do you know how to play?” Akira asks.

“I used to see Shido playing this game a lot,” says Akechi. “Technically, I guess I learned from him.”

“That’s pretty impressive. I don’t know if I could teach myself just through observation.”

“Oh, no. He taught my mother. Then she taught me.” Akechi reaches for the white knight piece, places it two squares forward and one square left. “Games to pass the time in containment were very important. You can only do riddles and word games for so long.”

“How’d you do it without a board?”

“Coordinates. We’d just say it aloud and try and remember where all the pieces were in our heads.”

“You any good?”

“I’m better than she was,” says Akechi. “But I’ve never played a game against Shido.”

For a bit, they trade moves: Akechi is a surprisingly slow player, taking his time with each and every move, even though to Akira’s eyes his moves seem more or less fairly standard. “What’s going to happen to Shido?” Akechi asks suddenly.

Akira thinks about it. “Jail? I think I mentioned jail.”

“I know that. How long? What sort of jail?”

“Depending on how good the prosecutor is, a life sentence. I’d say ‘hopefully an awful jail,’ but I think most jails are.”

“I see.” A pause as Akechi mulls over his next move. “I always did want to play chess against him. At least once. Since it was the game he taught my mother to play.” He moves a pawn—maybe not the best move Akira’s ever seen, but then again, he supposes Akechi hasn’t had too much practice. Akira reaches for his next move without hesitation. “Did you know that he’s my father?” Akechi says, and Akira nearly drops his piece.

“You’re half human?” Akira chokes out.

Akechi smiles with a sudden sarcastic charm that tells Akira that he _knows_ he’s being an asshole. “ _Technically_ my mother had a human top half and a fish bottom half, so she was half human too.”

“Wait—Shido and your _mother_ —with the fish bottom half—”

“Ah, no,” says Akechi. All trace of humor disappears. When he speaks again, his voice is even and solemn: “There was a surgery. When they found a surprisingly human-like womb, they tested it to see how it worked. There was a turkey baster involved.”

Firstly: What the fuck. Secondly: Akechi isn’t even _fully inhuman_. Debatable whether or not Akechi’s mother was necessarily a terrible, inhuman creature herself, considering her actions, but now, it seems, the uncanny resemblance Akechi has to the rest of the human race is easily explained. It’s obvious why calling him a monster or a predator is no more accurate than it is to call any other human a monster. Akechi’s complex thoughts and feelings, his capacity for rational thought, to play games, to manipulate speech and read books and even dote on cats—and Akira had really thought that Akechi was an animal? A big, unthinking shark with a human face, when all the signs were so clear before him?

“You seem surprised,” says Akechi lightly, jolting Akira out of his revelations. “It’s still your turn.”

“Your mother—Akechi, I’m sor—”

“Make your move, Kurusu,” Akechi interrupts. “I don’t need your sympathy.”

But Akechi has it, whether he wants or needs it or not. Akira moves whatever first piece he can grab just to keep the game going. Akechi makes an irritated noise. Akira moves it back, tries to screw his brain on right to think rationally for even the two seconds required before he goes back to losing his shit. “I put your dad in jail?” Akira blurts out.

“For which I would thank you,” says Akechi, “if I hadn’t wanted to kill him myself.”

“You’re better than that,” Akira says without thinking.

Akechi laughs. “Considering that looking forward to murder was the one thing that prevented me from going the same way as my mother? I certainly am not.”

“You’re half human! You don’t have to murder him! You can have a choice between monstrosity and doing the right thing. I told you the whole time—”

“Does biology matter so much to you?” says Akechi, narrowing his eyes. “You hear that I had a human father, and all of a sudden you’re _convinced_ that I can be more than just an animal?”

By god, does Akechi make it hard to say anything positive about him. “A few bad apples spoil the barrel,” Akechi remarks. “For all _you_ know, a few drops of such tainted blood overrule any and all humanity I could ever have.”

“Then I believe you have a choice,” says Akira firmly. “You can choose to be whatever—whoever—you want to be.”

Akechi stares down at the chess board. The expression on his face is smooth and unreadable as the gears in his head turn. “You don’t believe that,” he says at last.

“I do.”

Akechi shakes his head, slowly. “I—”

And then Akira’s cell phone rings.

Akira would, sincerely and honestly, have never considered answering the phone if the caller ID hadn’t read _Munehisa Iwai_. Even then, the single moment he hesitates feels like a betrayal. “Answer it,” says Akechi, in the sort of haughty tone Akira has learned he uses when Akira knows he’s hurt, and turns away.

“Akechi—”

“I said answer it.”

Akira’s fingers feel waterlogged and clumsy as he presses the button. “ _Tomorrow’s the day_ ,” says Iwai’s voice. “ _You got a specific time?_ ”

Akira closes his eyes.

For a whole second, Akira can’t believe that he never arranged an exact time and place for the exchange—for another second, Akira suddenly can’t believe that Iwai’s really coming. He’d been thinking about Iwai and waiting for Iwai and even depending on Iwai and somehow it now seems unreal that this moment, this little space in the bathroom, is going to end when Iwai finally shows up.

(Did he really start to think that he could keep Akechi here forever?)

Akechi tilts his head. Akira wonders if he can hear Iwai’s voice through the receiver.

“ _Kurusu?_ ” says Iwai’s voice again.

“Usual time,” says Akira automatically. “My apartment.”

“ _You still on the first floor?_ ”

“Yeah. No stairs. But you’re going to want a van. At least a truck.”

“ _Fragile? Do I need packin’ peanuts or something?_ ”

“The tank’s plastic. All it has inside is water and a specimen. So long as it doesn’t break, it’s fine.”

Akira feels like an actor in a role, reciting lines that aren’t his. When he meets Akechi’s eyes again, it’s like being torn into two selves: The Akira that Iwai remembers arranging Akechi’s pick-up with to get Akechi off his hands as soon as possible, and whoever Akira is now. Akira looks away quickly. “Get a tarp to cover the tank,” says Akira. “And don’t open it. If it talks to you, don’t listen.”

“ _Great. That’s ominous. I’ll bring earphones._ ” Typical Iwai: All business, no questions. “ _Anything else?_ ”

“I’m glad to see that you are, at the very least, consistent in your determination to cage me like a feral animal,” says Akechi coldly, before Iwai can end the call. “For all your talk, in your eyes, I am a vicious, mindless creature to be released into a freezing hell, safely far away from the rest of humanity.” Akechi gestures over the chessboard. “When push comes to shove, the truth comes out.”

‘ _Rest of humanity_ ’ is maybe the first and only time Akira has ever heard Akechi imply that he belongs to the rest of the human race. Akira bites his lip.

“ _Kurusu?_ ” asks Iwai.

“Wait,” says Akira.

“No, by all means, Kurusu,” says Akechi. “Don’t hesitate when you pull the trigger.”

“ _Wait_ ,” says Akira again, more emphatically, more to Akechi than Iwai. “Hang on. I’ll call you back later. Uh, give me another five days.”

“ _Five days? Kid, I booked tomorrow for you._ ”

“You owe me a favor. At least four favors,” Akira says.

“Stop it,” says Akechi. He sounds angry, now. “Follow through. Euthanize me while you’re at it.”

“I’ll call you back,” Akira says to Iwai desperately and jabs at the phone until it goes dead and then drops it on the bathroom sink. “I made a mistake. I’m changing my mind.”

“There’s no mistake about containing a dangerous predator,” Akechi says tightly.

“You’re not,” Akira says, and steps over the chessboard to kneel at the side of the bathtub.

This close, Akechi’s eyes are wide and doe-like from shock. Surprise so pretty and earnest can’t possibly be faked, Akira is sure of it.

“I get it,” says Akira quietly. Akira can see the faint outline of freckles along Akechi’s nose, now that he’s right in front of him. He can see the shallow breaths that pump through Akechi’s gills along his neck and torso. “I understand now. You’ve never been a monster. It was our fault for saying that you were in the first place.”

Akechi tilts his face away. Once, Akira would have thought it was a purposeful show of shyness and a flirtatious show of his long neck, but now he is virtually certain that this fragile vulnerability is part of Akechi’s true face. Hadn’t Akechi always been more sensitive than he let show? Hadn’t he always been hurt by everyone who’d ever lost faith in him and cast him away? Suddenly, Akechi’s bare skin looks more exposed and naked than ever before without the pride and resignation that Akechi wore like a mantle of armor. Akira wonders what that skin would feel like under his hands. Cold or warm? Smooth or rough? Like or unlike a human’s? Would it be as gentle as he looks now?

“Someone is so sure I won’t rip his skin off now,” Akechi says quietly.

“You didn’t touch Morgana.”

“Morgana is a _cat_.”

“You’re not a monster,” Akira says firmly. “I trust you.”

For a second, Akechi looks so stricken—even upset—at the words _I trust you_ that suddenly Akira is more sure of what he’s about to do than he’s ever been before. He leans forward, reaches for Akechi’s face to turn him to look back at him. Akechi’s cheek is smooth under Akira’s fingers. Like a human’s, but without any of the baby fuzz that a human should have. Warm. Akechi lets him turn his face towards him easily; if anything, Akechi looks equally as entranced by Akira as he is with him.

“You really trust me?” Akechi says, a delicate note of strain in his voice. Like he wants it to be true so badly that it hurts.

“Yeah,” says Akira quietly. “And I promise this time I’m not lying.”

Akechi moves closer, hesitant, like he’s expecting Akira to run away or for himself to run away or both. “So you can keep me here in this bathtub and have your way with me…?” Akechi says.

Akira laughs soundlessly. “Only if you want me to. Other than that, I think the choice should be yours.”

Instead of answering, Akechi closes the distance and presses his lips, as carefully as someone might press a flower between the pages of a book, against Akira’s. Maybe this is Akechi’s answer. Akira had been so focused on all the other shit going on that he hadn’t thought—no, he’d thought about it, Akechi was too attractive not to—but he hadn’t really _imagined_ Akechi might choose him; Akechi’s lips feel almost unreal, surprisingly warm and soft and he tastes clear like water. Akechi nibbles at his lips with palpable longing and Akira can feel his stomach lurch like it’s his first kiss.

“I wanted this for so long,” Akechi says quietly, and then immediately just looks embarrassed. Akira can’t stop himself from kissing him again, and again, hungry for the little soft inhales Akechi makes whenever Akira touches him gently. Ever since Akira had wound up with a criminal record, anyone he’d ever dated and wound up treating him like he had a disease the second he’d told them the truth; to hear someone say they really wanted him… “I never thought anyone could really believe that I could have a choice,” Akechi breathes against his lips.

“I’ll believe as much as it takes,” Akira promises. “Enough to make up for everyone else.”

The expression on Akechi’s face is so wrought-out, now, that Akira feels his own chest hurt with some old scar from almost a decade ago, when he’d been a teenager in Tokyo wishing that someone would take him in, believe he could do better, trust him again after the probation order had gone down. Akira cups his cheeks and kisses him first this time, drawing closer until he’s leaning over the edge of the tub. Akechi’s hands are cold through Akira’s shirt when he winds his arms around him. It’s the first time someone’s held Akira in years. He can’t suppress his own shudder.

Akira’s got half a mind to crawl in the tub with him at this point, but he doesn’t think it’s big enough for both of them, so he sits on the edge and tilts Akechi’s face up, pressing kisses along his cheeks and the little freckles Akira never saw before. “Akira,” Akechi moans, soft desire and just a hint of neediness in the whine that makes Akira want to give him everything he asks, to taste him until he falls apart with pleasure, to never doubt he was loved again and Akira kisses him back hard just as Akechi’s teeth rip clear through his bottom lip.

Bone scrapes against his chin. Akira hears himself make an inelegant yelp before he feels the pain, and even when he jerks away he can feel himself making it worse as skin rips free. Akechi’s arms are vicelike around his chest. Faster than Akira can move, Akechi pulls him down into the freezing bathwater.

Pain bursts across his mangled lower face when he hits the water. Akira scrabble blindly for the rim of the bathtub as Akechi shoves him hard against the porcelain, his tail slithering into Akira’s lap to hold him in place.

Under the water, Akechi bares his teeth, stained red and trailing a long strip of Akira’s skin. For one wild second, in the haze of cold fear and mind static, Akira can’t help but still want to pretend Akechi smiles at him out of love.

“Took you long enough to get in the water,” Akechi says smugly. “I told you that there’s always a lure for everyone, didn’t I?”

Akechi’s feeble attempt to shove him off is easily pinned down. “Hold still,” Akechi murmurs. “I worked hard to pull you in. I’m going to savor you.”

One hand peels Akira’s head back and for one terrible second Akira is certain he’s going to go for the throat, only for pain to streak down the side of his face as Akechi rips the flap of Akira’s left cheek off, gnawing at the muscles in Akira’s jaw until Akira hears them snap in his ears. Akira claps one hand over his nose so he doesn’t gasp underwater and lose all his precious air. He thrashes again, pushing Akechi away with his free hand to absolutely no effect. Akechi is about five times heavier than Akira ever thought he could be, because the weight of his tail alone is enough to pin him down; if anything, the more Akira struggles, the more Akechi’s teeth dig deeper, moving upwards from Akira’s mangled lips to gnawing at the skin at his cheek and around his eyes, his tongue flicking briefly over the eyeball as Akira’s vision goes red.

“Don’t like my lovebites, Kurusu?” Akechi croons. Even his voice sounds mulchy with how much flesh is in his mouth. In the corner of his vision, Akechi grins widely. _There’s so many teeth_ , Akira thinks vaguely. Obviously there were not that many teeth before. Or he would have noticed. He would have noticed, right? It’s hard to think—it’s hard to—

Suddenly the air is cold on Akira’s face—on what’s left of his face, and the exposed muscles and skull underneath. “Don’t drown on me,” Akechi says, voice smooth and gentle as the underside of an ocean wave. “There’s still so much left of you to eat. Meat is always better fresh, don’t you think?”

As Akechi’s weight presses him against the back of the tub, Akira lashes out with his free arm—misses—clips Akechi on the side of the face with his elbow instead and Akechi’s eyes stretch wide. His teeth bare. Mania and hunger and delight stretch his skin taut along his skull, until Akechi’s eyes seem to bulge from his head, unnaturally round. “Kurusu,” he warns.

Akira knees Akechi in the stomach for whatever soft gut Akechi might have and aims for the ears next, hoping to disorient him and Akechi’s head snaps around and catches Akira’s forearm in his teeth and—

The crack of Akira’s forearm shattering between Akechi’s jaws. Liquid streaming between Akechi’s fangs, down Akechi’s chin, Akira’s voice screaming one second before Akechi shoves him under the water and everything goes silent. No matter how he thrashes to free his arm, Akechi’s teeth dig deeper, sliding through nerves, Akechi’s top and bottom fangs meeting each other in the middle where Akira's forearm fragments crumple and grind against each other inside his mangled skin. Bubbles escape Akira’s mouth and water clogs his throat. He gags and chokes and only more water rushes in as Akechi’s hands pin him to the tub floor so hard that Akechi’s nails pierce his thin T-shirt, slide under Akira’s skin to scratch along his sternum, slipping in between the slats of his ribcage. Blood whisps out of the puncture points to join the rapidly-darkening red water. Akira can feel Akechi’s jaw grinding through the bone shards in Akira’s arm like he means to bite clear through.

Then a tug, like Akechi means to pin Akira down and rip Akira’s whole arm off from the socket with only his teeth. The pop of the shoulder dislocating loud through the roiling water. Akechi pulls harder, enough that Akira gasps and sucks in another lungful of water and fear turns his body cold and he can feel his shoulder socket begin to pop and separate and Akechi pulls again, and again, until Akira almost wishes the arm would come off so it could be over. Akechi’s pointed fingers curl through Akira’s chest and begin to tear his shirt off as easily as he scratches deep gashes down Akira’s soft stomach, scrabbling to separate the meat from the ribs like ripping a wrapper off a present; pinned to the bottom of the tub, no matter which way Akira struggles, it’s only a matter of time before he feels Akechi’s fingers pop through to the hollow of his chest cavity. Blood rises in plumes alongside strips of his own shirt. The long mass of Akechi’s tail drags pointed scales through Akira’s pants and legs, serrating the flesh as Akechi’s tail writhes to hold him down.

Akira might have drowned right there if Akechi hadn’t hauled his head up out of the water a second time, teeth finally unlatching from Akira’s mangled forearm. Between sputtering water and the iron burning in Akira’s eyes, he barely catches a glimpse of the shattered white bone dripping in pieces from a bloody mass that ends in a hand dangling from the pulpy mess. (That’s _his_ hand, isn’t it? But it only looks familiar, like seeing the face of a stranger.) There’s Akechi, bloody water and bits of skin still caught in his open teeth.

“There,” says Akechi, and digs his nails in Akira’s wrecked arm. Akira’s own waterlogged scream is so loud he barely hears Akechi say: “Can’t have you fighting back _too_ much, can we?”

Akira vomits out another rush of water to spill warmly down his own neck just as Akechi sinks his teeth clear through the meat of Akira’s exposed dislocated shoulder.

Akira has never thought about how much chewing goes into ripping apart raw meat. He uses a knife to cut raw steak or chicken like everyone else. Now, he feels every thrust of Akechi’s teeth sinking into his muscle over and over, crunching through the clavicle, the long rip as Akechi finally gets a piece of meat free. It comes off in a strip, pulled down Akira’s bicep until Akechi rips it free. He barely chews before he slurps it down all at once. Akira stares, mesmerized, at the glistening half of his bicep muscle still attached to the bone. The other half of his bicep disappears rapidly into Akechi’s mouth.

Then he blacks out, probably. When he comes to, Akechi has widened the puncture points in Akira’s stomach to a neat gash, large enough to worm his hand into to the wrist, and Akechi’s face is buried in Akira’s left breast, or whatever raw, gaping mess is left of it. For some reason, Akira wonders immediately if Akechi ate his nipple when he ripped out his pectoral muscle. There’s a bit of chewed-off flesh in Akechi’s mouth, which Akechi’s throat works through—undulating movements, like a snake—until it slips down his throat.

Akechi swallows and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re more tender than you look, Kurusu,” says Akechi, like a compliment. “Did you take care of your health for your future lovers?”

Akira’s brain is one long siren of pain. It has no words and does not think. Akechi leans in and Akira’s body moves weakly on its own away from him, but not far. He still can’t breathe. He can feel water in his windpipe, making his lungs heavy and soggy, sloshing in his stomach, but the grip of fear is too tight on his gut to let him throw it back up now.

“Iwai,” Akira gurgles.

He means that the second Iwai comes to the apartment at the appointed time, Iwai will see—whatever’s left of Akira (Sugimura’s scalp and hair floating in the tank)—Iwai will get the shotgun. Of course Akira doesn’t get the words out. _What the fuck is Akechi thinking, killing the only person who can get him back to the ocean?_ Akira thinks, and then: _The frog. The scorpion._

“Concerned for me?” says Akechi’s voice. It sounds oddly stilted and filtered, like a parrot imitating human speech. Maybe Akechi’s fluent sentences and gilded words were always imitation, and Akira just hadn’t noticed. “You’re such a good person, Kurusu. It’s really your strongest trait.”

At this point, Akechi hits a bit of skin he can’t slice apart with his nails, so he slides gracefully under the water to grab it with his teeth and rip Akira’s abdomen open that way. Akira’s screams are waterlogged with all the liquid he inhaled. More water rushes inside his opened gut; he feels bloated, like a balloon being pumped full.

When Akechi comes back up out of the water, he’s swallowing again. The water is now so red that it stains every inch of Akechi’s face. “You like to feel good about yourself,” Akechi goes on, like there was no interruption. “You like to feel that you’re helping the poor, troubled animal, who just doesn’t know any better. A savior extending a generous hand. You’re such a good person, in fact, that you’ll go anywhere it takes if it means you can feel like you’re helping some poor little boy in need.”

Chills set in. Akira’s entire body starts shaking. Aekchi seems almost sympathetic, or at least expectant, because he comes close, as if trying to be reassuring.

“I’d usually start with the organs,” Akechi tells him quietly. This close, it sounds like he’s telling Akira a secret between lovers. “The organs are the parts that taste the best, after all. Human muscle is usually such a chore to work through with all the bones and tough bits involved.”

Akechi’s fingers are working their way under his skin again. Akira can feel him grip his ribs, ready to snap them and open Akira up. Everything hurts until, weirdly, it’s like nothing hurts, and the most distinct sensation Akira has is the stretching sensation as Akechi saws at the skin with his nails to widen the slit in his gut. Akira thinks about Akechi opening up Akira’s stomach and chest cavity like someone opens up a refrigerator door to examine which leftovers he’s going to reheat for dinner.

“And I’ll get to the organs soon,” Akechi says, now opening the slit in Akira’s gut with both hands. Distantly, Akira registers himself as struggling. His body doesn’t give up, even when he’s barely aware enough to tell it to resist. “But your shoulder actually didn’t taste so bad, if you’d believe it. You’re very fit. Even your face was decent. And you _are_ a good person, in the end, so I think I’ll make you last.”

Akechi’s hand comes up to cradle the remains of Akira’s half-eaten face, but the look of hunger, Akira knows now, is trained purely on the bits of meat still clinging to Akira’s mangled jaws. “I’ll savor you as long as I can,” he murmurs. “Non-essential limbs first. I have a feeling someone as stubborn as you will stay conscious for the show.”

Akira knows he looks afraid, then, because Akechi’s expression turns fond. Like he’s admiring a pet he’s eager to keep, if only to play with for a little while.

“Poor little Akira Kurusu. So desperate for someone to save, you’d make someone up if given half the chance.” Akechis lips part as he leans in, nose flaring at the scent of the remaining meat of Akira’s right cheek.

“Akechi,” Akira gurgles, without knowing what he means to say.

Akechi’s voice is as sweet as it’s ever been as he says: “You and your fucking savior complex will feed me so, so well.”

Before this moment, if Akira had been asked if capable of committing murder, he would have said yes, because he had no idea what it really meant to look someone in the eyes and put your hand around their neck and want them choking and screaming and growing cold and lifeless in your hands. Now, he would still say yes. He will never have the time to understand the fury bitter in his mouth or the new hatred he never knew he could understand, but his body already knows: He’s going to die. He might as well make it worth it.

This time Akira’s remaining fist lodges solidly in the gills along the side of Akechi’s torso. Akechi screeches, too high pitched to be human, as Akira takes a fistful of whatever flesh he can grab and crumples his fist, until the delicate bladed skin of his gills collapses and turns wet with blood. When he pulls the skin free, Akechi rears away, exposing his neck with—the gills, Akira thinks, _go for the gills_.

He still has the ripped remains of Akechi’s torso in his hands when he gets his fingers around Akechi’s neck. Akechi writhes, snaps his jaws and sprays spittle when he hisses, but with Akira’s jaw locked, he manages to hold Aekchi as arm’s length long enough to dig his fingers into the slits. The slit of Akechi’s gills are slippery, like touching a human tongue. On instinct he bares his teeth and digs his fingers in; like putting his hand inside an open wound, or putting his fingers down someone’s throat.

Akechi’s eyes go round with hatred as he gurgles. Does Akira have his fingers literally inside Akechi’s throat right now? Can Akira kill him like this? Akira’s elbow strains to stay locked the more Akechi struggles to lunge forward and bite the rest of Akira’s head off and something sharp on the inside of Akechi’s gills slides under Akira’s nails and serrates his fingers and his hindbrain screams that he’s in danger and Akira wants only one thing in that moment, which is to make Akechi dead.

Akira’s voice wet in his own ears from fluid he hasn’t coughed up, inhuman even to himself.

Akechi’s teeth snap wildly at Akira’s forearm, jaw stretching too wide and almost mechanically fast with how it opens and shuts. Under him, Akira doesn’t notice Akechi’s tail curling around his legs in favor of digging his fingers into the gills, feeling the flesh stretch and begin to tear—and for a moment, Akechi looks surprised, even furious, maybe even betrayed that his prey has the genuine upper hand if only for a second. Akira rips the left gills open in a spray of soundless loose skin and Akechi snarls and howls under the water, looking so hurt and in pain and almost scared that looks just like a human, and that’s what makes Akria bare his teeth and dig his hand into the soft gills on the other side of Akechi’s throat, starving to see that human-like vulnerability and despair one last time when Akechi finally realizes that Akira might not survive but at least he’ll bring Akechi down with him—

Akira’s legs snap. The world tilts. Akira jolts, almost slips below the water as Akechi’s tail tightens, twisting and squeezing where it’s wrapped around Akira’s thighs and waist until Akira can feel his hipbones creak and split and his vision goes white, he’s falling for what seems like forever in the space between the open air and the surface of the water, and Akechi’s open jaws lunge forward to meet him.

Teeth close through Akira’s throat. Serrated bone scrapes against his spine and his windpipe pops and collapses. They crash through the water’s surface together.

Under the water, Akira’s vision is dark with more than just his blood in the water; air drains from the puncture points in his opened neck and his lungs feel crushed and small; Akechi’s arms wrap around him tightly as Akira’s body flails. Akechi’s teeth chew and saw through his throat, determine to pull the flesh from the wound until it tears and at last separates. Water swells in the open hole where half of Akira’s neck used to be. Liquid floods his esophagus, his windpipe, the open hollow of his exposed gut, sloshing against his exposed heart and stomach and lungs, which still float at the water rises inside Akira’s chest cavity. Water laps gently against Akira’s exposed spine, the back of his rib cage. Liquid pools lower in his gut around where his intestines are still connected.

For a moment, Akira is sure that he’s waking up from a dream full of lukewarm water and the tang of metal in his mouth, and he will open his eyes to see Akechi smiling sweetly at him from over the rim of the bathtub, head cocked and eyes wide, looking at Akira like he’s the only person in the world. In front of him, Akechi spits out the chunk of Akira’s throat from his mouth.

This time, Akechi makes no move to pull Akira back up to breathe. And this time, Akira realizes, dimly, that he is going to drown in three feet of bathwater, if he doesn’t bleed out from his mangled throat first.

“Oh, Kurusu,” says Akechi, his voice clear even under the water. The weight of Akechi’s tail is smooth and solid in Akira’s lap, intertwined in Akira’s broken legs like a lover.

Akira’s mangled throat makes a soggy noise. Bubbles slip from the hole in his neck. He starts to realize that Akechi may have eaten the lower part of his tongue, because the remaining bit in his mouth is floating loosely without a tether.

“I’m so glad you tried to kill me,” says Akechi. He sounds almost proud. “I’m so glad that you realized that there’s no one here worth saving.”

Akechi’s hands slip back inside him. The brush of Akechi’s hair soft on the remains of Akira’s chest, as Akechi drops the mangled chunk of Akira’s Adam’s apple into the water and lowers his head to Akira’s opened torso. The gentle tug of organs coming free. Akechi’s jaw working as his teeth sink into parts of Akira that he can’t quite feel, only vaguely register being moved around inside him in ways they shouldn’t be. He’s pulling Akira’s intestines out by the handfuls, leaving them to sink into the red water to rest on Akira’s own lap. He can’t feel his legs anymore. His mouth sucks down water, no more air for him to lose, the tight fog of air loss setting in. Akira has never felt lighter than he does now pressed to the side of his bathtub under gallons of water and hundreds of pounds of Akechi’s body and tail, watching the lightbulb grow dimmer overhead through the water’s surface.

_Was all of it a lie?_ Akira thinks hazily. _Was every one of your smiles just another lure? Every word you said a calculated trap?_

The crack of bone snapping between jaws, bending and cracking as Akechi’s hands force his ribs wider. He can hear his own heart squirming in the bathwater. Akechi’s jaws close around the open edges of rib, tearing the muscles from inedible bone. More ripping. Bits of meat floating through water. Akechi’s hands holding him down so he can peel Akira’s abdomen from him with only his teeth.

Akira lifts his remaining hand. Grabs Akechi’s shoulders, first. Akechi’s human skin is oddly gritty, like there’s fine-grain sant or scales invisible along his flesh. Shakily, Akira palm bumps against the fins and ridges of Akechi’s face, the hard edges where the scales came out and the jaw unhinged. He can barely feel Akechi’s skin against his through the static fuzz spreading through his body. _You’re not a monster_ , he means to say. _You could have been good. You could have done the right thing. I believe._

He isn’t sure if it’s true. He just hopes that it’ll hurt Akechi one day, hopes Akechi has enough of a conscience to remember him. He’s got to believe Akechi had a real choice. For better or worse, no sound comes out of his open mouth. _You could have done the right thing_ , Akira shapes with his mouth. _You chose this._ On Akechi’s face, an expression of interest, like a scientist observing a specimen, watches as Akira’s hand slips off his cheek without barely a sound.

*

Morgana mewls.

Goro pulls his head up from the water, his hair plastered to his face and dripping with red water. Only Akira’s hand dangles over the side of the tub, the rest submerged in his diluted blood. The tubes dangling from Akira’s kidneys trail from Goro’s mouth.

Morgana meows again.

For a long second, both Goro and Morgana stare at each other with wide, unblinking eyes. Then Goro slurps the kidneys down and extends a hand dripping with red water. Morgana crawls forward and sniffs his fingers lightly. The remainder of Akira’s head is still visible over the rim of the bathtub. “You’re kind of stupid, aren’t you,” Goro remarks.

Morgana licks Goro’s hand, then sneezes.

Goro laughs quietly. On the bathroom sink, Akira’s phone begins to buzz, rattling until it slips into the sink and goes silent. Either Iwai comes tomorrow to check in with Akira, or he comes in five days—either way, Goro has always known that Iwai was his expiration date. Either he dies here in this bathtub with his last prey, or he dies frozen in the Antarctic. “How was it, being his pet?” Goro asks Morgana, scratching Morgana’s head fondly. “Did he treat you well? Did he feed you every day? Did he look after you? Groom you?” Morgana purrs and closes his eyes contently. “Did he believe the best in you? Did he love you?”

Morgana tilts his head up for scratches, exposing his little cat neck.

Goro smiles, smoothing down the cat’s fur, making sure to reach behind the ears like Morgana prefers. He’s too full for dessert right now, and he still has to get Akira’s skull open for the brain, but it’s nice when the food stays alive and close by. Snacks are always better fresh. “Aren’t you gorgeous,” Goro coos, clicking his human tongue in a kissy noise the way Akira used to. Morgana gives him a happy purr. “You’re just a stupid animal. Just a kitty cat doing kitty cat things. Isn’t that right, Mona-Mona? You don’t know any better.” Goro leans against the side of the tub, satisfied and drenched in the stench of fresh meat, smiling prettily as Morgana licks at Akira’s flesh from under Goro’s nails. “Yes, you are. Yes, you are.”

**Author's Note:**

> twitter [@p5crimes](https://twitter.com/p5crimes)  
> tumblr [@akechicrimes](http://akechicrimes.tumblr.com)
> 
> [Art by greenmilkjelly!](https://twitter.com/greenmilkjelly/status/1358596006716215298?s=20)   
>  [Art by Astrarxi1!](https://twitter.com/Astrarxi1/status/1361492635291123715?s=20)   
>  [Art by hwangdahlia!](https://twitter.com/hwangdahlia/status/1359878583213121540?s=20)


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